A Durable Peace Read Online Free PDF Page B

anti-Semitic fires were collected into one vast conflagration that destroyed the millennia-old Jewish communities of Europe.
At the same time the Jewish people, again precisely as Herzl foresaw, stood on the threshold of the creation of the State
of Israel.
    Why was international opinion so ready to receive Herzl’s ideas? At the beginning of the twentieth century, the widespread
support for Zionism in the leading countries of the world was grounded in a view of the Jews that had developed in the wake
of the European Enlightenment two centuries earlier, a movement that stressed the natural rights and liberties of all mankind.
Many, though by no means all, of the Enlightenment’s leading thinkers (Voltaire being a conspicuous exception) believed that
the Jews had been unjustly condemned to suffer an unparalleled deprivation of these rights, with all the misery that this
deprivation entailed; hence the Jewish people were entitled to be reinstated to a position of dignity and equality among the
nations.
    It was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the father of so many of themost powerful ideas of the Enlightenment, who put his finger on the uniqueness of the Jewish situation:
    The Jews present us with an outstanding spectacle: the laws of Numa, Lycurgus, and Solon are dead; the far more ancient ones
of Moses are still alive. Athens, Sparta and Rome have perished and their people have vanished from the earth; though destroyed,
Zion has not lost her children. They mingle with all nations but are not lost among them; they no longer have their leaders,
yet they are still a nation; they no longer have a country, and yet they are still citizens. 4
    The solution to the problem of the Jews initially seemed obvious. The Jews would be granted civic and religious equality in
the societies in which they lived. In America, where a new society was being created according to the principles of Enlightenment,
Thomas Jefferson wrote with considerable satisfaction that he was “happy in the restoration of the Jews to their social rights.” 5 Similar advances were being made in Europe. The Jewish problem was well on the way to being solved.
    Or was it? Rousseau, at once arch-revolutionary and arch-skeptic, also sounded one of the earliest chords of skepticism. After
the legacy of “tyranny practiced against them,” he was not at all sure the Jews would be allowed or able to partake of the
new liberties envisioned in the new society, including the most basic one, freedom of speech:
    I shall never believe I have seriously heard the arguments of the Jews until they have a free state, schools, and universities
[of their own], where they can speak and dispute without risk. Only then will we be able to know what they have to say. 6
    In this, Rousseau was among the first to condition personal freedom on national freedom. Although in our century of dictatorships,
many have wrongly believed that national freedom canhappily exist without individual freedom, 7 Rousseau was hinting here at a contrary idea: that the Jews could never be truly free as individuals unless they possessed
a free state of their own.
    This idea was later developed and modified by the Zionists, who said that the Jews would never be equal unless their persecuted
members came to live in a state of their own, and that even those who were left behind as fully enfranchised minorities would
suffer from a sense of inferiority unless they too had somewhere a sovereign homeland that would bolster their sense of identity
and to which they could choose to go—much as the Irish in America had Ireland, the Italians had Italy, the Chinese had China.
    But the fact was, and it was plainly evident to the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment, that the Jews did
not
have such a homeland to which they could return. As Byron evocatively captured it in his “Hebrew Melodies”:
    The wild dove hath her nest
    The fox his cave
    Mankind their country
    Israel but the grave. 8
    Slowly at first, then